The failure at Cuba, forcing Moscow as it did to live with
an adverse strategic balance, destroyed the basis of a further
political-military offensive against the Western alliance. At
the same time, the responsiveness of the Kennedy administration to the conciliatory element in the Soviet post-Cuba
policy line, combined with the existence of mounting centrifugal forces in NATO, offered Moscow increasingly good
reasons to seek a détente and even certain agreements with
the West. But the Soviet approach to arms controls was also
conditioned by an awareness that the balance of forces
within NATO and in the NATO capitals made all but the
most limited of East-West agreements improbable.1 These

According to Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy considered
that "the greatest failure during the first two and one-half years of
his presidency was the fact that we had reached no concrete agreement with the Soviet Union in the direction of a lessening of international tensions. After the Cuban nuclear confrontation, however,
he felt the world had changed and that perhaps there would be less
opposition to a renewed effort for agreement. This view was not

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